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We venture a little farther from home with this image taken at sunset. If you look closely you can see a couple leaning together in deck chairs at the end of the pier as they take in the evening colors and the activity on the bridge. We got here by car while on a trip to visit a family home place. Can you guess where we are? And, how about our last image, re-posted below, from the self-proclaimed "World's Oldest Junkyard Jungle"? Have you ever considered a junk yard for a morning outing? Would you be more interested if you knew that over it's eight decades in existence this place had hosted hundreds of photographers from ad agencies and media companies? It's called Old Car City and it is located in White, Georgia just off I-75. If you are traveling northbound from Atlanta, take the exit north of exit 290 at highway 411 and turn right. You'll run into Old Car City on your right after a short drive. If you have kids with you, the magnificent Tellus Science Museum is off the same exit, on the other side of I-75. Here's what the Old Car City has to say about itself: "Old Car City . . . contains the worlds largest known classic car junkyard [that] . . . started as a small general store in 1931 and is still family owned and operated. . . . . With over 34 acres and over 4000 American-made cars from the early 20th Century, these cars, trucks, vans, and even a couple school buses are placed in such a way as to be ideally suited for photos, videos and custom camera shoots. Over the 8 decades since first started, thousands of photographers, videographers, ad agencies and media companies have visited Old Car City USA. Popular news magazine and newspaper companies, like CBS Sunday Morning, the New York Times, the BBC and Georgia Public Television, have made press releases and/or video segments and transmitted it worldwide." -----
All photos and text are copyright Clinton Richardson. If you like these posts, please tell your friends about the Venture Moola blog at Readjanus.com. And, feel free to share this blog. The more readers the better. Click here if you would like to get a weekly email that notifies you when we release new entries. Or, click in the side column to follow us on Facebook or Twitter. Again, we are on a short trek this time, not that far from Atlanta. It's a blast from the past with iconic hood ornaments and more. It's the self-proclaimed "World's Oldest Junkyard Jungle" but we all know about hyperbole and the limits of truth-in-advertising. Can you guess where we are? And, did you know where we were last week, in the presence of the giant shadow bear shown below? If you travel to Western North Carolina or spend much time in North East Georgia, you might have recognized this seasonal phenomena. You might have even seen it mentioned in a local paper or heard it talked about. We photographed this scene in the fall of 2018 to capture the changing colors of the turning trees. It was a beautiful partly cloudy day as we drove up to the site hoping the clouds would clear for a full experience. Sharing a narrow curbside along a winding two lane road not far from Cashiers, North Carolina, we watched with a small crowd of onlookers as the sun's slow setting threw this shadow bear into full view. First it appeared as just a small shadow, Then it grew slowly into different shapes, turning briefly into a duck caricature and then into this master of the mountains - a giant black bear. A small cheer erupted from the folks watching by the roadside when the bear came into full view. And then, just as it had slowly materialized it continued to change until the bear was absorbed into a larger and more generalized mountain shadow. Locals call this phenomena the Shadow of the Bear and it appears for just a short time twice a year, once in the fall and once in the spring, when the earth's angle toward t he sun is just right. -----
All photos and text are copyright Clinton Richardson. If you like these posts, please tell your friends about the Venture Moola blog at Readjanus.com. And, feel free to share this blog. The more readers the better. Click here if you would like to get a weekly email that notifies you when we release new entries. Or, click in the side column to follow us on Facebook or Twitter. Our next location for our Where in the World series is closer to home, with home being Atlanta, Georgia. It is a vista you can visit any time but a sight you can only see briefly on sunny days for a couple of weeks a year. You have to stop by the right bend in the road and arrive at the right time. Can you guess what the locals call this appearance? And, where you can visit it yourself? So, where were we in the image below? The one shared two postings ago? We were enjoying the ultimate lunch interruption while cruising between islands of the Galapagos. Our captain spotted a nearby pod of killer whales while we were eating and quickly dispatched us in the ship's motorized pangas to follow them. There were a dozen or so whales and a pair of sea lions in the group - teenage boy sea lions if I had to guess. They meandered through the water paying us no attention, swimming and diving and rolling around and between us for more than an hour. Sometimes they got so close, the spray from a tail slap or a quick dive would fall into our vessels. The one below, diving next to our panga, created his own rainbow. You can see it if you look closely. -----
All photos and text are copyright Clinton Richardson. If you like these posts, please tell your friends about the Venture Moola blog at Readjanus.com. And, feel free to share this blog. The more readers the better. Click here if you would like to get a weekly email that notifies you when we release new entries. Or, click in the side column to follow us on Facebook or Twitter. Here are more clues to the location of the image we included in our last post showing an elderly couple reacting to three killer whales just out of reach next to her rubber raft. Admittedly, telling you it was on the equator did not narrow down the possibilities much. Today, we will add that we were west of Equador on a small boat tour. Half the passengers were alumni from our college and the other half were members of a fraternity, fortunately for us, a physics honorary fraternity. I cannot remember if the gentleman above is a fellow alumnus or a physicist, but I will reveal that he is photographing a blue footed boobie. And, that none of the animals we saw were the least bit intimidated by our presence. We are visiting a variety of islands renowned for their ecological diversity. The man who put these islands on the map changed the world view and had this to say about discovery:
Yeah, I am not sure what he is saying either but it sounds like something you might try to do while sheltered in place. But, one last image and then back to our question. Can you tell where in the world we are? -----
All photos and text are copyright Clinton Richardson. If you like these posts, please tell your friends about the Venture Moola blog at Readjanus.com. And, feel free to share this blog. The more readers the better. Click here if you would like to get a weekly email that notifies you when we release new entries. Or, click in the side column to follow us on Facebook or Twitter. We start a new series today to celebrate the world at large while we are all shuttered in place. Back when borders could be crossed and social distancing was not universal, we took images of that remind us of just how big and beautiful the world can be. Can you guess where we are in this picture? And, what we are doing? I will give you one hint. We are not far from equator. Send us your guesses and we will give you our answer when we post our next image in the series. -----
All photos and text are copyright Clinton Richardson. If you like these posts, please tell your friends about the Venture Moola blog at Readjanus.com. And, feel free to share this blog. The more readers the better. Click here if you would like to get a weekly email that notifies you when we release new entries. Or, click in the side column to follow us on Facebook or Twitter. The rear window on this truck we found parked outside a Moab rock shop says, "4 out of 5 voices in my head say go for it." In 2018, I listened to those voices and committed to post weekly to this photo blog. In March, we posted peter-peter-peter and the BAND with this image of a singing titmouse. The post shared the modern paleontology view that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs. Think modern day velociraptor when you watch your next bird belt out a tune. In April, we spent a couple of posts visiting the issues of light pollution and the joy and wonder of finding a visible night sky. The first called The Color of Black and White featured an image from a very dark sky in Utah while the second, It's Not That Far From Here, explored the night sky from the the Pisgah Forest near the southern entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway. If you have ever wondered what it is like to venture out in the middle of the night away from city lights to take in a truly dark night sky, check out one of the posts. As I noted then, it is both invigorating and disorienting to be out in the dark away from civilization and your comfort zone. And, while you can easily get lost if you are not careful, you will have a unique experience that will remind you of the vastness of the universe and our small place in it. Night sky viewing takes you back in time. The light you see from the stars and planets started traveling our way millions and even hundreds of millions of years ago.the sky you see in dark places is the same sky our ancient ancestors viewed at night. Consistent with looking back in time, we also used April to visit Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, using the images they left on their coins in our entries on Ancient Social Media and A Selfie of Cleopatra. The entries include coins from the Ancient Selfies Collection featured in my 2017 book Ancient Selfies, a 2017 International Book Awards Finalist and 2018 eLit Awards Gold Medal Winner. The coin above was issued to pay a young Cleopatra's troops in 48 BC while she and they were pinned down in Cypress by her brother's armies. Shortly after, Julius Caesar arrived in Alexandria and demanded to see both siblings. Cleopatra snuck into Alexandria wrapped in a rug and changed the course of history. May took us to Yellowstone and gave us perhaps my favorite posting of the year - Magic Mike and the Otter - where we relate our experience touring Yellowstone in a snow storm with one of the worst guides on the planet. But, how bad could it be if it generated images like the one above? Think Ace Ventura with a chili dog smeared across his face dragging four Atlantan's around in a mad rush to see his first wolf of the season. The day failed in its guide's primary objective but provided lots of entertainment. That's a coyote above, just one of many interesting sightings we did make that day. The wolf came the next day, early in the morning when I was without a guide and had stopped to watch a pair of elk grazing along side the Madison River. In our Wolf in the Wild posting, I relate the heart-pounding experience of watching a lone wolf confront a elk less than a hundred yards away from where I was standing. Of course, this was not all we saw or wrote about from our trip. Moose and grizzly bears also featured prominently in our visit and our blog. The moose we found ourselves surprisingly close to when he ambled out of a willow stand not 10 yards away. Revisit that experience at Moose-a-boo and The Moose Whisperer, the two posts we dedicated to that adventure. The bears we experienced from greater distances (thank goodness). Our first experience was a bear jam just south of a construction zone in Yellowstone, along a route Magic Mike had taken us the day before. You can visit that at Grizzly Jam or join us a few days later in Grand Teton National Park as we catch up with Griz 399, perhaps the most famous grizzly bear on the planet. The surprise of the summer, however, came closer to home. For the last few years, we have been seeing great blue herons just across a cove from our cabin in North Georgia. Last year I found what I thought was "the" nest responsible for all our sightings high in a pine tree next to the water. This year I had a few days to search out the nest in my kayak, heading out several mornings and evenings to search for this year's heron's nest. Over the course of a few outings across the cove (I was not the brightest crayon in the box on this one), it became apparent that not only was the nest occupied with young herons but that there were several nests - a great blue heron rookery - on the island that hosted the first nest. Who knew herons nested in rookeries? I wrote about this a few times, capturing the closeup below in the posting called Great Baby Blues and images of the herons nesting high above in Seeing Through a Lens. and Dinosaurs Across the Cove. If you would like to see a cormorant launch himself from a log in the water near the rookery, check out The Launch posting. Perhaps a favorite heron (or dinosaur) image came from one of these trips across the cove. Seen below is a young heron waiting to be fed in a nest several stories up. I think this chick looks positively prehistoric, a worthy heir to its direct line to the ancient Tyrannosaurus family. Ancient Odysseus, the clever Greek wanderer, entered my mind when I saw this hulking Oldsmobile in a North Georgia junk yard. The place was filled with hood ornaments and logos that hailed back to ancient heroes. This particular rusting old car, however, is what brought to mind the spent figure of Odysseus sneaking back into his home after decades at sea. This connection and the image of Odysseus from an old Roman coin sparked the discussion in the Ancients Among Us post. And that is just part of our 2018. We also posted thoughts an images from great National Parks in California and the West. Joshua Tree, Death Valley and the geologic wonders of Yellowstone all caught our interest. And then August took us far from our comfort zone. Twenty-four hours of flights and layovers to go somewhere we had never been before - the wilds of Kenya. More about all of this in our next Venture Moola Retro posting. _____
All photos and text are copyright Clinton Richardson. If you like these posts, please tell your friends about the Venture Moola blog at Readjanus.com. And, feel free to share this blog. The more readers the better. Click here if you would like to get a weekly email that notifies you when we release new entries. Or, click in the side column to follow us on Facebook or Twitter |
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